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‘Top Chef: New Orleans’: How do you say schadenfreude in Vietnamese?

Hey, Cheftestants, did you know that Emeril has a secret door to your house that he uses to sneak inside whenever he wants, without warning? Try not to think about that when you go to bed tonight! This time Emeril is using his secret door to barge in (biegnetless, alas) with chef Eddie Huang to announce the next challenge: the cheftestants will be placed into groups and have to come up with a Vietnamese menu with at least one shrimp dish. Oh, and there’s no Quickfire, we’re going straight Elimination.

Eddie Huang and Emeril give us a little bit of New Orleans (and, really, Gulf Coast) history, explaining that in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese immigrated to the United States, and many of them moved to New Orleans (the Gulf Coast) to work in the shrimping industry. And not to get too technical here, but the Vietnamese population didn’t really move to New Orleans proper, but rather to the nearby coastal areas and the area across the river from downtown New Orleans, known as the Westbank (even though it’s more like the “Southbank,” but that’s a whole other issue that we don’t have time for).

(dirtycoast.com)

But I only point out the whole Westbank thing because this business that Emeril is spouting about how Vietnamese food has influenced New Orleans cuisine is a bunch of nonsense. For the most part, the two cuisines have remained completely apart; the culinary streams have not been crossed. Vietnamese restaurants only really started appearing in the Eastbank after Katrina. And with the exception of Donald Link’s wonderful new seafood restaurant Peche, most restaurants that serve New Orleans’ cuisine do not incorporate many Vietnamese (or other Asian) ingredients or techniques.

That’s not to knock New Orleans cuisine! New Orleans’ cuisine is its own thing! Its own, wonderful thing! And it’s not to say that New Orleanians don’t enjoy Vietnamese food or that it’s not a part of the New Orleans area’s culinary heritage. And it’s not to say that because of Vietnam’s history as a French colony that there aren’t some similarities between Vietnamese food and New Orleans’ cuisine — they both love them some good French bread and pastries. It’s just to point out that as of now, Vietnamese food isn’t a huge influence in New Orleans’ cuisine, contrary to what Emeril might have to say about it. (Here’s the part where you go into the comments and leave me an angry comment about how August once had “ramen noodles” as a part of a dish and therefore my argument is invalid. Knock yourself out.)

And all of that said, good on Top Chef for pointing out that not only is there a thriving Vietnamese community on the Gulf Coast, but that its cuisine is unique and complicated and wonderful. (And it is, second only to Tex-Mex, Houston’s comfort food, true story.) RANT OVER.

Emeril splits the cheftestants up into three random teams:

Orange Team: Brian, Carlos, Nicholas, Louis and Michael

Red Team: Shirley, Justin, Carrie, Patty and Nina

Green Team: Janine, Bene, Travis, Sara and Stephanie

Carlos PANICS! at the idea of Vietnamese food, having never eaten it in his life because they don’t have Vietnamese food in Chicago, I suppose? I mean, that doesn’t sound right, but I’m sure that the only thing that would prevent a well-trained and talented chef from trying new and different cuisines would be if they weren’t available to him where he lived, like, if for instance Chicago didn’t have an entire neighborhood called “Vietnamese Town” or something.

Emeril and Eddie then load the teams up onto a party bus — without a stripper pole?!? but I thought all Bravo party buses came complete with a stripper pole! what is happening, I don’t even — and drive them over to the Westbank for a “crash course” in Vietnamese food. Travis is all, “I’ve been to Vietnam and dated a Vietnamese guy, so I could give Emeril and Eddie a crash course on Vietnamese food,” because hubris.

On the party bus, Shirley who is INTENSE and NOT KIDDING AROUND, begins planning the Red Team’s menu and Nina St. Lucia compares Michael to Pamela Anderson’s breasticles, i.e. he’s a big fakey fake faker. Nina really does not like her some Michael.

The group visits a Vietnamese bakery, some shrimp boating docks and a Vietnamese noodle house for some pho. At the docks, Shirley has the wherewithal to ask some of the shrimpers how they prepare shrimp, and actually listens to them explain that they grill them and eat them with butter. In contrast, Michael, Carlos and Janine nod politely as a shrimper gives them his seafood stew recipe and learn nothing.

Back on the bus, Travis insists that his team make some sort of tomato-sauced nonsense that he claims is common in Central Vietnam and he knows because he dated this Vietnamese guy this one time. Janine, who lived in Thailand for a month, has a skeptical.

Shopping, shopping, shopping, and there is a bit of a kerfuffle with the Green Team when our Asian experts, Sara and Travis, disagree about what to buy. It ends with Sara removing a bunch of their ingredients from the cart, but I’m sure that won’t be relevant later.

The cheftestants are then unloaded at Gretna’s Tan Dinh to prepare their menus for a restaurant full of Vietnamese folks and the judges.

On the Red Team, everything goes smoothly, there is nothing to report.

The Orange Team assigns dishes to everyone except Michael who has been given prep duty. Let me go over this again: The Orange Team decides to make Carlos, who has been PANICKING! for the past 48 hours about not knowing anything about Vietnamese food, make the traditional Vietnamese hot and sour soup with pineapple and tamarind. And they give Michael, who at least has eaten Vietnamese food once or twice or hundreds of times in his life, they give him prep duty. Nope, can’t think of any problems with this plan.

The Green Team, WHICH HAS GOT THIS ONE, YOU GUYS, TOTALLY GOING TO WIN IT BECAUSE TRAVIS DATES ASIANS, has Bene make the tomato sauce for the made up “Vietnamese shrimp in tomato sauce” dish because he’s Italian. That’s just logic. And that’s when the Green Team suddenly realize that they didn’t actually purchase any lemongrass? For Travis’s lemongrass sausage? EVERYONE PANIC. While Travis and Janine freak out and run around in circles looking for the lemongrass they know they put in the cart (but which Sara removed), Justin on the Red Team smirks that he has a ton of lemongrass and he’d be happy to share if they’d just ask. They do not ask.

Instead, when Emeril and Eddie arrive to check on the cheftestants’ progress, Travis immediately exclaims, “WE DON’T HAVE ANY LEMONGRASS FOR OUR LEMONGRASS SAUSAGE, IT WAS ‘LOST IN THE TRANSLATION’!” Sara, who is most certainly responsible for the missing lemongrass, glares at Travis from across the kitchen because the judges would have never known an ingredient was missing if he hadn’t told them it was missing, Travis. Eddie Huang is not impressed that the self-declared Asian expert is going to try to make a Vietnamese dish without lemongrass. In an interview, Travis, who is most certainly a white boy, sneers, “What does Eddie Huang know, he’s Taiwanese. He only knows a little of what I know. And he’s a douchebag.” Let’s just leave this here and back away because OH MY GOD.

Oh, and, additionally, just for good measure, the Green Team ruins their rice and double fries their shrimp before covering it in marinara sauce, but Travis had a Vietnamese boyfriend once and went to Vietnam on a trip and Sara cooks ramen at the airport so they are definitely going to win this one, absolutely.

The Orange Team is the first to present their menu:

Black pepper squid with cabbage by Nicholas
Gulf shrimp and pork belly spring rolls and dipping sauce by Brian
Fish head soup with pineapple and tamarind by Carlos
Beef broth pho with raw eye round and oxtail by Louis
Prep work by Michael

Gail enjoys the spring roll, particularly its paté-like filling, and Tom approves of the dipping sauce; everyone finds Carlos’ soup far too sweet, not nearly sour enough; Nick’s squid is unseasoned and needs more fish sauce; and Louis’ pho is woefully under-greened. Where is the cilantro and basil and jalapeños? COME ON, LOUIS. The guests and judges are completely underwhelmed, and Tom laments that he’s going to want to go out for Vietnamese for dinner because this ain’t cutting it.

The Red Team offers their menu, which Shirley describes as the story of the Vietnamese people in New Orleans:

Raw beef salad with pickled vegetables from Nina and Insecure Carrie
Vietnamese barbecue shrimp by Shirley
Beef pho with rice noodles and lettuce by Justin (which Top Chef website neglected to include a picture of, boo, but if that’s the biggest complaint I have about Top Chef website this week — and it is — they’re doing OK)
Lemon custard with caramelized banh mi by Carrie

(Quick New Orleans’ food lesson: Creole barbecue shrimp have nothing to do with Texas barbecue. Who knows why they call it “barbecue” because the shrimp are most certainly not grilled. Instead, the dish is basically head-on shrimp that are pan-cooked in a spicy, buttery Creole sauce. It is delicious, and you should eat it at Pascal’s Manale.)

The judges all agree that Justin’s pho is far and away better than Louis’s; Shirley encourages the judges to sop up the shrimp’s buttery Creole barbecue broth with some French bread and YES PLEASE;

the judges find the tartar to be too mushy and bearing little resemblance to proper Vietnamese raw beef salad which is shaved thinly (And available at Mai’s, Houstonians: number 98. If you’re as white as I am, you’re going to have to assure the wait staff several times that yes, you know what it is, and yes, you still want it.); the judges find Insecure Carrie’s lemon custard something of an afterthought: the presentation is horrible, but it tastes awfully good.

The Green Team is the last to present their “We’re Super Experts on Asian Food” menu which is guaranteed to win all of the prizes; in fact, the judges might just decide to end the competition right here and make everyone on Green Team Top Chef of this season, that’s how well Travis and Sara know their business:

The judges are not convinced by Travis’ pork sausage wraps – they like some of the flavors, but the dipping sauce is lacking; Tom doesn’t care for the filling in Sara’s dim sum; everyone is befuddled by the shrimp in tomato sauce because whaaaaaaaaa?; the rice is declared an unmitigated disaster, oily and “shattered”; but the macaroon is edible, so.

The cheftestants are returned to New Orleans and the Top Chef kitchen, where they have to listen in on the torture screen as the judges go on about how terrible Orange Team and Green Team did with this challenge: SO TERRIBLE! and how well Red Team did, despite not being experts on airport Asian food or dating Vietnamese dudes.

The Red Team is brought into the judges’ chambers first, where the judges basically tell Nina and Carrie that their tartar and lemon custard dishes were just OK, but that Shirley’s barbecued shrimp and Justin’s pho are why they are standing in front of them right now. And with that, Shirley is declared the winner for that drool-worthy dish — not that Top Chef website includes it in its recipes of the episode. Carlos’ grossly overly sweet fish head soup? Sure! You can have that recipe! Here you go! But Shirley’s winning barbecue shrimp? NOPE. NO RECIPE FOR YOU. GO DOWN TO THE SHRIMP DOCKS AND ASK FOR IT OUT FOR YOURSELF, DUMMIES.

And they try to pretend that it’s a toss-up: Orange Team or Green Team? But come on. In an Asian cuisine challenge, you screw up the rice? Line up for your well-deserved lashings, Green Team.

In front of the judges, Sara bursts into tears, wailing that they were SO EXCITED to cook “THEIR” FOOD and that being in front of the judges right now sucks. Oh? Does it?

Tom begins the questioning by asking what the deal was with the tomato sauce, come on guys, really, though. But really. Bene is all, “IT WAS TRAVIS. IT’S HIS FAULT.” Travis tries to claim that he had the dish this one time in Vietnam. But Tom is not hearing it, and compares making this dish to a theoretical contestant in a theoretical Parisian food competition preparing a Big Mac because there are McDonalds in Paris, which HA! IN YOUR SMUG FACE, TRAVIS. Eddie piles on saying that it is like Travis saw a UFO and instructed Janine and Bene to draw it. Which isn’t as good an analogy as Tom’s, but Tom has had more practice with destroying cheftestants, so. The judges then wonder about the shrimp, and Miss Hot Pants explains that she double fried them, because she wanted them to be extra hot when they were served? Which, then, why not fry them once right before they go out? Because who has ever heard of twice-fried shrimp?

Padma’s hate, however, is reserved for the rice. WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RICE? Sara throws herself to the wolves, even though it was really Janine’s dish, and explains that the rice cooker failed. The judges then feel compelled to say something negative about Stephanie’s macaroon, but they aren’t particularly convincing.

After the judges send Green Team away, the judges laugh and laugh at the tomato sauce, because honestly. Seriously, you guys. In the end however the combination of twice-fried shrimp and terrible, horrible, mushy rice proves just too much and Janine is ordered to pack her hot pants and go (IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU, TRAVIS) …

…straight to Last Chance Kitchen. If you don’t have 10 minutes to spare to watch the video, I’ve spoiler fonted the results here, drag your cursor over to read: Janine beat out Aaron, Ramon, Bret and pretty boy Jason with some lovely fried oysters that she managed to only cook once. She moves on to compete another day.

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Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..